The fall issue of Spacing Magazine features a short piece by ERA’s Graeme Stewart in a section called “Opinion Makers.” The article reviews Toronto’s history of residential tower development and explains the evolution of the new RAC zone allowing new program and land use in our apartment neighbourhoods. Read the full text below:

On Wednesday, June 24th ERA joined hundreds of friends and community members at the East Scarborough Storefront to celebrate the launch of two new landscape features: the Sky-o-swale shade-water structure, and the MLSE/Jumpstart Sports Court.

The Toronto Star’s ongoing “Big Ideas” series shares ideas from Toronto planners, architects, and creative thinkers on how to make the city a better place. Recently The Star’s urban affairs columnist Christopher Hume chatted with ERA’s Graeme Stewart about various issues and initiatives surrounding the Tower Renewal project.

As announced recently in the Evergreen CityWorks’ Intersection Magazine, the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal is teaming up with Evergreen CityWorks and Derek Ballantyne (CEO, Community Forward Fund) to engage in new initiatives in Tower Renewal. The purpose of this Tower Partnership will be to develop feasible funding and implementation strategies for a series of Tower Renewal sites in the GTA, working with project partners City of Toronto, United Way, Metcalf Foundation, Toronto Atmospheric Fund and more. The ultimate goal is to provide usable new models for revitalization as hundreds of tower communities across the region begin exploring the possibilities of new RAC zoning and other tools.

Below, please see more detail on the new initiative, as published in Intersection, v1n1:

Recently the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) held a competition to create innovative master plans to revitalize Toronto’s San Romanoway Affordable Housing Complex. The “Greening the Grounds” competition asked participants to propose designs that would provide this priority neighbourhood with a new community garden, urban orchard, greenhouse, market space, shelters, seating, paths, recreation areas, and more. The winning entry will be refined and implemented beginning as soon as autumn, 2014.

On view now at Harbourfront Centre is a new exhibition of photos by six photographers, including ERA’s friend Chloë Ellingson. Citing the Tower Renewal Project as one of its inspirations, Chloë’s work documents the topography of Toronto’s inner suburbs from the vantage point of various tower apartment buildings. Chloë’s full set of photographs can be viewed here.

This June, Toronto City Council approved the proposed Residential Apartment Commercial (RAC) zone. Following a process of nearly two years of research, public consultation, policy development, and advocacy in partnership with United Way,City of Toronto and Toronto Public Health, the RAC zoning will take effect by summer’s end, (barring appeal), in nearly 500 Apartment properties that form dozens of Apartment Neighbourhoods across the city.

The new zoning by-law provides a new and flexible land-use framework for Apartment Neighbourhoods. The goal of this new framework is to enable healthy, complete, and vibrant neighbourhoods better able to respond to local needs and opportunities. The goal is addressed primarily by allowing for a full range of uses within these neighbourhoods: commercial activity, social activity, and community services – amenities that most areas of Toronto take for granted.

Recently Toronto Public Health released a new “Active City” report, which analyzes Toronto neighbourhoods based on the opportunities for physical activity they provide, and makes a series of recommendations for expanding opportunities for more active and healthy lifestyles across the city.

Recently ERA’s Graeme Stewart presented a crash course in Tower Renewal at a Toronto PechaKucha event focused on urban innovation. The short, 7-minute talk covers half a century of Toronto’s history and, right up to some of the exciting new initiatives taking place in and around Toronto’s Tower Neighbourhoods.

The following article by Edward LaRusic was recently published in the Toronto edition of Novae Res Urbis:

The city is proposing a new zoning designation to transform the concrete towers of Toronto’s inner suburbs, typically poorly served by transportation, retail and other amenities, into complete communities.

If approved, the new zoning designation of “residential apartment commercial (RAC)” would loosen restrictive rules on high-rise apartment neighbourhoods that date to the 1950s and, it is hoped, attract small businesses and services to the densely populated communities cut off from their surroundings.

According to the creators and stewards of the Jane Jacobs Prize, Ideas that Matter and Spacing Magazine, this honour “celebrates individuals who contribute to the fabric of Toronto life in unique ways that exemplify the ideas of Jane Jacobs. The prize recipients reflect the diverse aspects of city life.”

The City of Toronto wants to bring more vitality and convenience to its Apartment Neighbourhoods. In March and April, a number of public consultations will be held to incorporate the ideas of community members.

A new zoning type, “Residential Apartment Commercial” (RAC), has been created to provide more amenities and more usable public space in selected neighbourhoods.

Throughout the first part of 2014, the Toronto Star is running a series called “Big Ideas“, asking Torontonians to think big about the future of the region. What type of Toronto do we want to create in the years to come?

For our contribution to this series, we discuss Tower Renewalas the key to realizing the region’s potential. The piece can be found at Here at thestar.com, or below:

As part of the ongoing to work to re-examining zoning in Apartment Neighbourhoods, a series of maps have been developed to identify trends, patterns and areas of high impact in phasing the implementation of the new RACapartment zone.

The RAC zone is a new set of policies to provide tools and opportunities as part of the larger initiative of Tower Neighbourhood Renewal.

Building from mapping conducted for the report Tower Neighbourhood Renewal in the Greater Golden Horsehoe, maps complied here show the distribution of towers throughout the City; where towers congregate into large clusters forming tower neighbourhoods; and where these large tower neighbourhoods experience high incidence of social need.

On Saturday January 18, The East Scarborough Storefront hosted a public design charrette with partners United Way Toronto, Toronto Public Health (TPH), Sustainable TO, Architext, and ERA. Saturday’s discussion focused on TPH’s new program “Healthy Corner Stores,” a project that proposes to give suburban communities better access to fresh produce, and other healthy food options, through convenience stores.

Healthy Corner Stores is part of the growing Tower Renewal initiative, which aims to bring new amenities, healthy choices, and life on the street to Toronto’s tower neighbourhoods.

One of the key challenges facing the region’s Apartment Neighourhoods is providing convenient access to healthy fresh food to the thousands of residents that call these neighbourhoods home. Over the past few years, ERA, CUR+R and project partners United Way Toronto and Toronto Public Health have advocated for, and are in the process of implementing new zoning by-laws to allow the sale of food, goods and services in these neighbourhoods, which is today often prohibited.

Over the past several month, United Way Toronto has been hard at work with community partners and local residents across the City engaging in a series of initiatives in many of Toronto Apartment Neighbourhoods. Key aspects of this ongoing work has been summarized in an October 2013 memo, outlining recent practical achievements, and looking to the near future for goals for engaging in Tower Neighbourhood Renewal in the coming year or so.

On Sept. 30, 2013, ERA’s Graeme Stewart participated in a City of Toronto Chief Planner’s Roundtable, hosted by Jennifer Keesmaat. The Roundtable, entitled “The Shape of Toronto’s Suburbs,” is the first of three sessions devoted to critical thinking about the history, evolution, and future of the GTA’s suburbs. Participants included John van Nostrand, Leo deSorcy, Pamela Blais, Laurie Payne, and Leona Savoie.

The panel raised a number of issues, including employment, distance, transit, private vs. public investment, small-scale and large scale intervention, and zoning reforms that are about to change the way things are done in some communities.

Though the situation is far from simple, the sense coming out of this Roundtable is very positive: Toronto has an enormous resource in its suburbs (and in the apartment neighbourhoods that make up so much of their fabric). New design and policy approaches can help remove the false dichotomy of ‘suburban’ vs. ‘urban’, and help us imagine a healthy, vibrant metropolis for the entire region.

The City of Toronto’s Tower Renewal Office (TRO) recently published two new reports describing the project’s accomplishments in the last two years, as well as future goals that were adopted by the City of Toronto’s Community Development and Recreation Committee in Sept. 2013.

The two reports show TRO’s impressive outreach to over 300 buildings in the City, with plans for engagement, assessment, and action in many more in the years to come.

The Toronto area contains the second largest concentration of high-rise buildings in North America. The majority of these are modern concrete residential buildings, built during the City’s post-war expansion. The Tower Renewal Project is an initiative to re-examine these buildings’ remarkable heritage, neighbourhood histories, current place in our city, and future potential in a green and equitable Toronto. A growing list of partners include the City of Toronto, CMHC, and the University of Toronto, among others. Click here for more info about Tower Renewal.